Lego, a ukulele and a typewriter - our best childhood Christmas gifts
Chef Aisling Larkin, Co Waterford: was enamoured with a Petite 900 typewriter. Picture Denis Minihane.
I can still remember it as if it were yesterday. Waking up to a snow-like silence.
The crack of light from the lamp in the hall peeked in like a cheeky elf, inviting me to come out of my nice warm bed and find out what Santa had brought me.
At first, I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t in its usual locations, the sitting room and kitchen were empty.
But just as my excitement became tinged with panic, I spotted it down the hall.
No wrapping, it stood there in all its bright red elegance - my new racer.
Earlier that year, Stephen Roche had won the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia and the World Championship in an almost unprecedented treble and in the Christmas of 1987, I was going to take my first strides towards emulating him.
I loved that bike, and while I never quite made it onto the podium in Paris, I did win quite a few Tours de My Local Area with my mates from the nearby estate.
Aisling Larkin held similar hopes for her chosen career when she unwrapped her Petite 990 typewriter a few short Christmases later.
“I really loved that thing,” says the celebrity chef.
“I got it when I was seven and the same year my sister got a post office set and we also got a bank set. It was a real typewriter. It was white blue, blue all around the edges and a little bit of yellow. We had a full village in our room where we would play office, type and send letters and write stories. My dad would encourage me to write a story but I could never think of anything. I wasn’t so good at storytelling. I struggled with the imagination side of it when teachers asked me to write a story off the top of my head. So what I used to do was get cookbooks for Christmas and I would type out recipes. Without realising it, I was putting together my own little cookbook.”
It turned out to be the first of many and through her social media channels and her regular TV and radio slots, Aisling has become quite prolific.
“Now I tell stories all the time,” says Aisling.
“I tell stories about food producers, about the recipes, the history of the food, what it represents in a culture, its nutritional benefit. So I think I was a storyteller. I think I am a storyteller. I just didn’t know how to write a story like a novelist. I write my own stories about food.”
As a child, Kieran Cuddihy, was a big fan of LEGO.
Today the Newstalk presenter is captain of the popular Hard Shoulder but back on Christmas morning 1991, his only interest was to command the black troops on his shiny new LEGO Blacktron Spy Base.
“I had asked for it,” says the Kilkenny man.
“Myself and my sister loved Lego and I already had what I thought were the goodies, the white knights if you will. So in my head, the Blacktron were the baddies and I needed them to balance things out a little bit. Santa didn’t wrap the presents in our house so as soon as I turned the corner into the play room I could see it out of the corner of my eye.”
“We had a medium-sized snooker table in the house,” he recalls, “and we had a sheet of chipboard cut to the size of the table that we could build on. We also had these road plates.
We’d build whole cities. I think the reason it really stands out is because it was a piece of Lego that none of my friends had. So it was unique in that regard amongst my peer group.
There were a huge amount of variations in it and we knocked so much fun out of it for years. Bits of it are still around. My parents still have a big Lego box in the house and there is lots of it still there.”
Somewhat amazingly, the same is also true of Martina O’Donoghue’s most memorable Christmas present.
“When I was a young child, I got a toy ukulele from Santa,” says the radio host. “I’m guessing I was around eight years old. I never called it a ukulele though. It never really occurred to me that that’s what it was. I called it a guitar. I guess my ‘guitar’ was small and I was small so we were somewhat in proportion to each other.”
“Unfortunately, I never received any lessons I just banged away on those strings to my heart’s content. My family must have been cursing Santa. I always loved music. Around that time, the highlight of my year would be watching The Eurovision Song Contest. Soon, Top of The Pops became a weekly highlight, and I was absolutely obsessed with listening to the radio. My rock-star career never quite took off, but I found my calling in radio, playing the music of others.”
Eventually, Martina outgrew her tiny guitar and it lay abandoned for a long time at her parents’ house.
“In recent years, we were reunited,” she says. I went looking for it to show to my own child and found it hidden away gathering dust in a corner. We brought it back to our house, where it now sits in my bedroom with one broken string. I think that’s why the gift of an instrument was a special one. It tapped into my love of music, even if I didn’t have the wherewithal to play it properly. Now it’s a reminder of more innocent times.”
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